the foot of the hall wall. He tried to fit them, painted side out, into the hole made by whatever weapon had narrowly missed his head. More dry plaster crumbled away from the lath and showered onto his feet. The hall table, presumably broken, had been removed. Serena was not going to be pleased when-if-she returned.
Ruso unfastened his left boot and shook out a piece of plaster grit. Then he leaned back against an intact stretch of wall, folded his arms, and began to make a mental list of the new questions he was going to ask Caratius.
He was interrupted by the reappearance of the short apprentice, pink in the face and clearly agitated. “It must be in our room, sir,” he declared, scuttling away toward the back of the house. “Won’t be a moment.”
There followed a series of muffled crashes, thumps, and screeches that suggested the flinging open of cupboards and the shifting of heavy furniture. After a brief silence in which Ruso wondered if he should offer to help, the noises recommenced with increased vigor. Finally the youth reemerged, his face even pinker and shiny with sweat. “Sorry about this, sir. He’s put it somewhere.”
“He” was presumably the tall apprentice. Moments later both youths were in the hallway denying having moved the letter from the surgery shelf and blaming each other for its disappearance.
“It was probably Doctor Valens,” suggested Ruso, not wanting to voice a growing suspicion that it was none of them. “You two get back to work. I’ll have a word with him in between patients.”
As they headed back through the surgery lobby, the tall apprentice voiced Ruso’s own thoughts. “Perhaps the burglar took it.”
“Huh,” said his companion. As the door closed Ruso overheard, “That’ll be the same thief as took the only decent pen I had, and gave you one just like it.”
Ruso went into the dining room. Since the apprentices were not allowed to use the room, there was no reason why the letter should be in it, but he might as well do something while he was waiting.
Shifting cushions and peering under the couch produced several small coins, a wooden whistle, a child’s shoe, a crust of bread hardened to the consistency of concrete, a green hair ribbon that must belong to Serena… and a writing tablet. His brief moment of elation was destroyed by the words Pharmacy List inked on the outside. Idly curious, he took it across to the window to read.
What it contained was not a list but a message.
Scrawled in a large and badly formed hand were the words, “When you finally notice that we are not here, you may want to know that I have taken the boys and gone to live with my cousin.” The message was scraped so deep into the wax that it had scored the wood underneath.
So that was it.
Ruso was more saddened than surprised. He wished he had found the note before Tilla had gone. She would have known what to say. In fact it would have been better not to have found it at all, or at least to have left it unopened. Now he felt like the woman in the old Jewish tale: the one who ate the fruit from the tree and knew too much. He should say something helpful to Valens, but what? How could a man interfere in his friend’s marriage? Especially since he was not supposed to have read the note, anyway.
He pushed the message back under the couch. When the apprentices reappeared with orders from Valens to question the kitchen boy and search the rest of the house, he closed the door of the dining room and told them he had already checked it. There was nothing there.
He entered the surgery just in time to see a middle-aged man stagger out into the street with a poultice clutched to his face and a message for the next patient that he would be called in a moment.
“Splendid abscess,” said Valens, describing the departed patient rather than the space beside a stack of rolled bandages to which he now pointed. That was where he had seen the letter late last night. He had almost called one of the boys to put it away until he realized it was not a patient record after all. “Somebody must have come in here after me.”
Ruso waited until the patient had shut the door-before suggesting, “The burglar was in here.”
Valens’s eyes widened. “Ruso, you don’t think you’re taking this investigation business a little too seriously? I know it must have been a shock finding this chap in the house, but really-what sort of burglar steals somebody’s letters?”
“The sort who wants to know what’s in them?” Ruso suggested, remembering Caratius’s eagerness to see the letter. “Or the sort who already knows and doesn’t want other people to find out.” He glanced around at the neatly stacked shelves. “If it was here last night and it’s not here now, where is it?”
“I don’t know,” Valens admitted.
“The women wouldn’t have taken it. Neither of them can read.”
“Nor can the kitchen boy, much.”
“Which leaves only the burglar.”
“I’m sure it’ll turn up,” Valens assured him. “You can let the lads carry on hunting for a while. I’m running late for house calls, and it’s much quicker in here without them. Don’t fancy seeing a few patients yourself, do you? Keep your hand in?”
“Sorry,” said Ruso, backing out of the room. “I’m only an investigator.”
At the far end of the hall there seemed to have been an explosion in the laundry basket. It was the work of the kitchen boy, still delving down and flinging out the contents. As Ruso approached, a blanket unfurled in the air. A sock disengaged from it and sailed past his shoulder. The kitchen boy apologized. He had not found the letter yet. “But we’re all looking, sir.”
“Thank you,” said Ruso, grateful for his efforts even though the bottom of the laundry basket had obviously lain undisturbed since whenever it was Serena had walked out and taken the staff with her. “Let me know if you find anything.”
He was not optimistic. If he was right about the burglar, then one question about the letter had been answered: Its contents were important to somebody. Unfortunately, the manner in which he had learned of their importance meant he was not going to be able to find out what they were.
The apprentices had now moved on to the upstairs rooms in their efforts to vindicate themselves. Remembering Tilla’s precious crockery, Ruso hurried up to restrain them. The box had been dragged out from under the bed and he deduced from the shape of the legs protruding in its place that the tall apprentice was conducting a thorough search.
“It won’t be under there,” Ruso pointed out. “Nobody who had it came in here.”
“I know, sir,” agreed a muffled voice. “But we’ve tried everywhere else.”
The legs began to shuffle back toward Ruso. The tall apprentice’s face, when it appeared, was smudged with soot. His hair was sticking up at unintended angles and a cobweb festooned one ear, evidence of his searching in other unlikely places.
“I’m going to have to go out,” said Ruso. “If you have to look in here, be careful of that box with “fragile” written on it.”
The boy’s bewildered glance around the room showed that he had not noticed the warning when he moved it.
“And that trunk has my medical texts and instruments locked in it, so don’t bother looking there.”
He turned to leave, and found himself facing the short apprentice. He was about to say, “There’s no point in two of you wasting time in here,” when he noticed a battered piece of parchment cut from a scroll in the youth’s hand.
“That’s not it,” he said. “We’re looking for a wax tablet.”
“Yes, sir,” said the youth, “but is it the actual tablet you want, or just what was written on it?”
Ruso paused. “You mean you can remember what was written on it?”
“No, sir.” The youth held out the parchment. “But I’ve got my notes. It was hopeless with two of us trying to work on it at once, so I copied it out.”
Ruso scanned the document and read aloud, “Dearest girl, when your sweet lips meet my eager-” He looked up. “This isn’t it, surely?”
“Oh, no, sir! That’s a poem. The other side.”
He turned it over and flattened the curve against the wall with his thumbs to reveal two lines of text in fresh black ink. As far as he could recall, the shapes echoed those of the original. They even curved down toward the foot of the document at the right-hand end.
The tall apprentice was leaning over his shoulder. “Why didn’t you say you’d got that, stupid?”
